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Guest Blog from Dr Sam Illingworth, Science Communications Lecturer, MMU. This blog was originally written for The Brain Bank Manc and it can be read in its original form here

The British Science Association (BSA) 2015 Science Communication Conference will be held on the 18th and 19th June at Manchester Metropolitan University, the first such time that the conference will have been held up t’North.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science, as it was then known, was founded in York on 27 September 1831, following a suggestion by the great Scottish polymath Sir David Brewster, who chose York for the first meeting of the British Association “as the most central city in the three kingdoms”. This was the first of a series of annual meetings that has continued for over 150 years. The first meeting to take place in Manchester was in 1842, since when our glorious city has hosted another four, with the last one coming in 1962.

Perhaps the best remembered of all these meetings was at Oxford in 1860, where the English biologist Thomas Huxley debated Darwinism with the then Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. Huxley’s speech ended with him stating that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but that he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth, a reference to the rhetoric skill, yet perhaps clouded judgement, of his opponent.

In many ways, Manchester is the perfect host city for the Science Communication Conference, not only because of its astounding number of scientists (for my money the Oxford Road corridor must have hosted the highest number of aspirational scientists – from John Dalton & William Sturgeon to Andre Geim & Kostya Novoselov – per square mile in the UK) that it has produced and nurtured, but also because of its commitment to communicating science in all of its various forms and guises, from the Manchester Beacon Network to the Manchester Science Festival.

The 2015 Science Communication Conference will be a wonderful opportunity for all aspiring Brewsters and Huxleys to come and share new ideas from across culture and society, with sessions available for a range of experience levels, from those after an introduction to science communication, to experts who want to have in-depth discussions about issues facing the sector. The key topics for the 2015 conference are: communicating through play, science communication for the public good, crowdsourcing, and telling stories with complex science & big data.

The call for proposals for sessions at the 2015 Science Communication Conference is now open, with an online form open to anyone who wants to propose a session that they would like to help organise. The deadline for proposals is 9th January 2015, so get submitting!

A handy set of FAQs to the conference can be found here; let’s all work together to ensure that Manchester is able to demonstrate why it is at the forefront of communicating science in this country.

Dr Linnie Blake, Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, on the work of the Centre and the week of spooky events that launched it.

The Gothic Manchester Festival, that ran between 21st and 27 October, has now come to an end. For a frantic week, myself and HLSS Faculty Research Fellow Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes played host to a number of sold-out Gothic themed events. There was a lamplit tour of the Manchester Gallery, a lecture by eminent gothicist Professor David Punter, a ghost hunt at Ordsall Hall, walking tours, a double bill of horror films at Cornerhouse (in collaboration with the BFI), readings by eminent and emergent horror writers and a one-day Open Day showcasing MMU’s academic work in the Gothic. It was quite the week. And quite a launch for the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies.

When I first conceived of the strange child that has become the Centre, I thought of it in several distinct but interlocking ways. As a subject specialist in Gothic film, tv and literature I saw it as a means of consolidating the research strengths of my home department: English being home to the MA English Studies: The Gothic and to a number of subject specialists with international reputations in this field. As a former MMU Public Engagement Fellow, I was keen that the Centre capitalise on the contemporary ubiquity of gothic culture to engage the general public – bringing our academic knowledge and the public’s investment in things gothic together in new and productive ways. As a former Programme Leader with an eye not only to recruitment but widening participation I felt that MMU English was ideally positioned to become a centre of excellence in the teaching of the gothic, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. As I first conceived of it, the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies was to be a local initiative for local people with a very ‘English Department’ flavour.

Like all gothic children, though, the Centre then grew in strange and unexpected ways.

With the support of MMU’s Institute for Humanities and Social Science Research the Centre is now the home to the Gothic Research Cluster which brings together specialists in Microbiology, Human Geography and Psychology as well as Literature and Film. This offers hugely exciting opportunities for trans-faculty inter-disciplinary work which I am convinced will bear its own strange offspring in time.

We have planned, for future launch, an open access online peer reviewed journal: which will facilitate speedy publication for late postgraduate and early career lecturers working in the gothic.

We plan to host a biennial postgraduate conference supported by eminent academics in the field. In collaboration with local groups and organisations, we plan to create a programme of training in public engagement and knowledge exchange for postgraduates and early career lecturers.

We will continue, of course, to work to a widening participation brief through the provision of Gothic Open Days to targeted schools and Sixth Forms.

And we are in discussion with project partners from the Manchester Gothic Festival about the creation and delivery of a number of short-courses in the gothic that will appeal to their constituencies. For these an AHRC bid is pending.

As our delightfully extensive media coverage shows, all of this has caught the public imagination at a time at which the appeal of the gothic has never been greater. For those of us who know about the gothic, this really comes as no surprise. The gothic, after all, speaks of the dark side: those aspects of contemporary society we’d rather not throw a light on, the parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden, the secrets and lies, the terror and cruelty and injustice of the present moment. It’s no coincidence that the gothic has never been more popular. In the present moment it has a great deal of cultural work to do. And the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies hopes to lead the way in its exploration of this most perversely vital of cultural forms.

For further information about The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, please see the webpage here.Follow Gothic MMU on twitter here.

Earlier in the year, our research group were awarded a large Medical Research Council (MRC) grant. The funding is part of the Life-Long Health and Wellbeing programme (LLHW), which is a major cross-council initiative established to meet the challenges and opportunities of an ageing population. Our work will target factors over the life course that may be major determinants of health and wellbeing in older age. The specific focus is on understanding the way in which our muscles and the nerves that control muscles change in older age, and how this may lead to weakness and problems walking or negotiating stairs and obstacles.

After agreeing to write something for the RKE blog, I set out with the intention to avoid patronising anyone and being dull, so I apologise upfront if I failed. In the interests of avoiding a lengthy and tedious checklist, I have assumed all applications are developed around a novel idea that has reach andimpact; the planned work meets the criteria of the specific funding body; and that the proposal is well written. This leaves two points that I think are crucial. As a final note, I have also given a personal perspective on the one factor that always comes up when discussing research and grant writing at MMU: Time.

1) The applicants must be recognised, leading experts. A funding body will carefully scrutinise the wider research environment and the profile of the applicants. These are partly judged by the scientific publications and previous funding success. In 3 previous grant applications a few years ago I felt that my own profile was not strong enough, so I brought in a team of co-applicants who could each contribute individual expertise and on paper all had better profiles than I had. I also named somebody else as Principal Investigator, despite doing the overwhelming majority of the work myself in reviewing the literature and writing the application.

I only had around 12 publications when submitting the LLHW application, and this worried me a little. However, the team of co-applicants included MMU colleagues and Clinicians from University of Manchester, and between us we had hundreds of published research papers and an impressive list of successful funding applications. Over the previous few years I have worked hard to boost my own profile: I was Workpackage Leader in the largest workpackage of the €12m “MYOAGE” Pan-European study into ageing skeletal muscles; I was co-Principal Investigator in a large-scale collaborative study to examine nutritional interventions to maintain muscle function in older age, funded by Danone; I was co-investigator in a £46,000 study to develop exercise interventions to maintain muscle function with ageing; and was involved in several other funded projects. At MMU we have some excellent facilities and in the application we showed pilot data to prove that we really could achieve the aims of the proposal. Despite having demonstrated a good personal research profile, excellent research team, appropriate facilities and the capability to successfully lead and complete large-scale projects, I nevertheless think that it was crucial to work with clinicians in the LLHW/MRC bid.

2) If at first you don’t succeed …try again. The idea behind the successful LLHW proposal started out several years ago. We had been reviewing the literature and collecting our own data over several years to understand the possible reasons why muscles become smaller and weaker in older age and why balance and walking ability deteriorate. We identified what we believe to be an important mechanism that, for several reasons, had been largely overlooked – giving us a novel idea. The idea had been written up and submitted for funding three times in the past 2 years, all were unsuccessful. Each time, the proposal was adapted and improved, with the LLHW application being the fourth revision of the same proposal.

Over the past few years I have written and/or been co-applicant on at least a dozen grant applications. All were directly related to exercise, nutrition and health, which are overarching themes in my own work and the wider Research Institute.

Time: It takes dedication sustained over many years to build up expert knowledge, a research profile, develop a network of leading collaborators and to write and submit grant applications. Equally, a lot of time is spent in the research labs developing new techniques and collecting research data to meet the aims of the on-going project, or collect pilot data to support the next application. This commitment to research has to be balanced against teaching duties as well as family life. More often than not, for me at least, research is completed in the evenings, weekends and by giving up annual leave. It thus goes unseen by colleagues and is sometimes denounced by my wife. Research is vital for the prestige and profile of the university; benefitting staff, students and the wider public, so it is important that we find a sustainable balance between commitments: unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to this just yet.

The RKE office are now offering more support to researchers and I would encourage anyone planning to write an application to get in touch with them and to chat with Heads of Department at the earliest stage of planning.